Amen.Been there done that.
Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
291–300 of 399 posts
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#292When I finished engineering school the prof said :
"The most important knowledge imparted to you here is how to look things up, how to verify your thoughts and get inspiration for new ones to make products faster , better and more efficient."
That was at a time when the latest slide-rule model was state of the art in calculatory equipment. So, yes, do google something before you reinvent the wheel .
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#293Thank you for this. Been a software engineer/Sysadmin for over ten years. It’s always nice to see something like this to remind myself (and others) that using google does not make you any less of a developer.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#294This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…
I agree, cs needs a split in roles kinda like nurse and doctor.
I think there should be 3 different roles.
Computer Scientists - Come up with the foundational algorithms etc.
Software Engineers - Translate and map those foundational algorithms into more readily available tooling, occasionally directly building a complex system using engineering principles.
Software Developers - Use the tooling created by software engineers to create user friendly solutions for the masses, aka developing apps or websites.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fred Brooks said this back in 1975. He called it a surgical team. Of course, no manager reads The Mythical Man Month, and those that do don’t follow it.
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't the central premise of the book that if you take a late project and add more people to the team it takes the project longer??? I've literally never met a manager that practiced this. Is the book still relevant? Not disagreeing, just curious.
It's been ages since I read that book, but there is more to it that just the tag line you mention. It is very common to take a plan for work and to say, "This would take 10 people 1 year to developer, but we need it in 1-2 months. So let's put 100 programmers on the team". This is very much more obvious in Enterprise space and government contracting, but you see the reasoning everywhere.
Here's quite a famous example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit... It shows a graph of the number of employees at Twitter over time. In Jan '08, there are 8. In Jan '09 there are 29. In Jan '10 there are 130. In Jan '11 there are 350. In Dec '13 there are 2712.
Although a lot of that staff are going to be sales and marketing (and probably the growth is justified), the development team is also growing exponentially during that time. The Mythical Man Month would say that probably they are spending a lot more money than they need to to get the growth they needed.
I used to work for a manufacturer of telephony equipment. On one of the products I worked on they had 5000 developers! (A single piece of code!!!). The average amount of code deployed was 1 line of code per day per developer. As much as we can argue that KLOC is a bad measure of productivity, if your average developer is only producing considerably less than 1 KLOC in an entire year, you know you have really, terrible, terrible problems. One of the questions you might want to ask is, if you want to write about 5000 lines of code a day, where is the sweet spot, actually? I think we can agree it's not at 5000 programmers. However, it's often really, really difficult to talk to non-technical management and get them to understand that more programmers does not usually equal more productivity.
I could regale you with literally hundreds more examples, but I think it's sufficient to say that, yes, the Mythical Man Month is still really relevant these days.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the system is so poorly evaluating people that they have to train an irrelevant set of skills to succeed in it, what does that say about the system?
I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.
There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#297This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…
I always bring a laptop to interviews (haven't had one in a long time) and Google stuff during the interview and pull up my notes. If they say something I responded with "well I will always have a laptop at work anyways".
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.
I've never worked pre-internet. In fact, I've had internet access in all of my jobs, but I've definitely worked pre-"internet was a useful source for searching for answers to programming questions". I mean, we had Usenet, and you could ask a question, but we didn't have search engines that were useful in that capacity. I definitely had a lot of books, but actually the vast majority of my information came from man pag…
RFCs are great and definitely under utilized. I was working on some stuff with CORS and Cookies at my last job and reading through portions of some RFCs really helped me solve my problems and understand how CORS works.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.
There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.
I've never done a take home test that produced anything that could have been vaguely useful for the interviewing company. Usually the problems are pretty artificial.
Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
#300This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…
I always bring a laptop to interviews (haven't had one in a long time) and Google stuff during the interview and pull up my notes. If they say something I responded with "well I will always have a laptop at work anyways".
Even though I was embarrassed when I couldn't state what inversion of control was because I didn't have my notes to remind me of the "shopping cart vs government form" metaphor, I think having me look it up and read it to them would have been worse. Do you mostly use it for syntax, not stuff like "how do you deal with a deadlock"?
https://www.quora.com/How-will-you-explain-Inversion-of-Cont...